was the table, was the chair, sat a child
in the kitchen and ate, was it still in the hall,
did no one wander around and count
their own steps, the window cross whiter
than usual at evening, small creatures in flight
transected the yard and dust lay on the glass
and a child was very still, was something
occurred with a bolt, was hot at the base
and faded, burst, a child opened its eyes wide
and could, it could not find anything.
Finely tuned to an existential north that is overshadowed by absence and loss...
Karen Leeder, Asymptote Journal
Ulrike Almut Sandig’s poems bear witness to a time and place—the GDR—that no longer exists. Missing Witness, by turns plain-spoken and elliptical, depicts an elusive world that lies in the past but is all too present.
Ulrike Almut Sandig (Großenhain, GDR, 1979) lives with her family in Berlin. She holds an MA in Religious Studies and Modern Indology and an MFA from the German Literary Institute in Leipzig. As a performer, she works with composers and performance artists, including Hinemoana Baker, and Alif and Grigory Semenchuk. She has published four volumes of poetry, two story collections and three albums of musical lyrics. Karen Leeder’s translations of Sandig’s poetry collection, Thick of it (Seagull Books), won the English PEN translation pitch and received a PEN America/Heim Translation Fund Grant. In 2018 Sandig and Semenchuk, aka Poetry-Band Landschaft, published their debut album with Schöffling & Co. In 2018, Hurst Street Press (Oxford/London, UK) launched a cycle of Sandig’s poetry collection, GRIMM, translated by Leeder. Sandig is a member of the German PEN section.
In Missing Witness (‘von fehlenden zeugen’), Ulrike Almut Sandig concocts small narratives of the imaginable, almost-there, and ungraspable in hauntingly poised poems that meander along a lyrically confident and well-versed path. It is a skeptical and gentle melancholia that gives only the contours of doom, which Sandig approaches feelingly and incrementally. Matching the tone, rhythms, and levitating gravitas of Sandig’s lines, Bradley Schmidt’s English gives us alive alliterations and lyrical ‘taciturn | creases’ that find their own momentum while staying thoughtfully close to the original.
Sophie Seita
Her poetry deals in the recognizably real: from the city or landscapes of the south to the minutiae of the everyday. But hers is also a voice tinged with nostalgia and a sensibility for landscape that harks back to models from the past, a compass needle finely tuned to an existential north that is overshadowed by absence and loss. Her language reflects this dichotomy: splicing contemporary slang with snippets of children’s rhymes, fairy-tales, or quotations from a nineteenth-century canon with a telling irony.
Karen Leeder, Asymptote Journal
Sandig takes reality and bends it like few can: she subducts gravity.
Die literarische WELT
Bradley Schmidt grew up in rural Kansas, completed a B.A. in German Studies at Bethel College (KS), studied German Literature and Theology in Marburg, and completed a masters in translation studies at Leipzig University. He lives and works in Leipzig as a translator and editor. He has been an adjunct instructor at Leipzig University since autumn 2009. He is an Assistant Editor at Asymptote and his translations of contemporary German poetry and prose have been published widely online and in print. Anna Kim’s Anatomy of a Night (Frisch & Co.) was critically acclaimed. Missing Witnesses is his first translation to be published in book form.
Chapbook
Publication Date: December 01 2015
Distribution: Direct Only